Archive for January, 2010|Monthly archive page

Finally, Oracle has finalized the purchase of Sun..frankly despite the assurances of Oracle, this whole thing is making me nervous about the future of these two technologies. Ok so they’ve open sourced Java however Sun (or now Oracle) still has a say on what goes in in the final versions.. some people say that its in the interest of Oracle to continue the development of the Java programming language and its API’s because a big chunk of its middleware is written in Java… what worries me though (and believe me I’m not the worrying type) is the licensing part and whether Oracle will continue the path of open sourcing Java? Oracle is not exactly the poster boy of open source.

while Oracle will continue to support MySQL in the foreseeable future and even agree to not release a new version of MySQL unless it also releases (in parallel I suppose) the community version.. it will only commit to do so only..

“..until the fifth anniversary of the closing of the transaction“.

that closing happened on the 28th of January 2010, therefore it is reasonable to expect that after January 28 2015, Oracle can do whatever it wants with the licensing of MySQL. My guess is, the strategy is to put some kind of doubt into the future of MySQL making people think twice when choosing between open source (MySQL is the de facto afterall) or getting a commercial alternative. Companies do not like uncertainty, chances are CFO’s and CTO’s would find this ‘uncertainty factor’ worrying enough to instead buy a commercial DB rather than using OSS. So nobody can really claim they’re out to kill MySQL (they promised the EU Commission afterall) but in the same breath they say we cant really say for sure what happens after 2015.